Laser for control of mosquitos, weeds and pests
github.com
github.com
[Edit] Apologies to the parent poster. I did not mean to derail the laser discussion.
The ecosystem impact is still super important to understand, but it's reasonable to think that other mosquitos, or similar insects, could fill the niche left behind.
Sure, but as with climate change, you may not like the result. I guess there's a fair chance that it won't be "just like now, but no mosquito bites". Mosquito larvae are a big source of food for others, and extensively prey on larvae of other species, keeping those in check. Adult mosquitos are important pollinators, too, and as we're currently discovering with bees, taking out an important pollinator has big consequences and while the ecosystems will adapt, it may well end up shedding very desirable species entirely, ecosystems take a long time to bounce back, and may be a lot less appealing to us afterwards.
Frogs and fish might suffer, too, they'll have to make do with a lot less food when you take mosquitos out, and what takes their niche may not be as palatable. You push these below a sustainable population size in an area, you probably lose them entirely, and their function of keeping insect larvae and adult insects in check. Since we'd like to enjoy mosquito-free summers ourselves, and soon, the time scales we'd typically do such interventions on is way too short for much adaptation in vertebrates to take place, generation times even of frogs and small fish are too long for that. You may end up with ponds that are way emptier and more silent, and with lots more creepy crawlies and possibly a long-term balance that has, say, way more rats, roaches, etc.
I guess it depends on whether the device is durable enough to last that long, and whether or not you’re careful enough to avoid burns with the spoon method!
Assuming your leisure time is worth 20p per minute, the cost is quickly amortized.
On the other hand, I'm put off by this rejection of differing viewpoints:
"While contrarianism is a valuable american (and human) trait, in this situation it is misplaced, mis-informed, and dangerous. An educated man's anti-vaxx, if you will."
... which employs a fairly lazy pejorative to dismiss (people that think perhaps we shouldn't eliminate mosquitos).
I believe I quote Will Durant: "The mosquito is the enemy of civilization" and I am intrigued, generally, by the idea of eliminating mosquitos ... but I also adhere to the precautionary principal.
Maybe save a breeding stock and frozen eggs, etc., in case there is some hidden consequence we didn't think of ?
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/03/28/7068387...
At a distance, its CO2 (30 feet away). Closer in, its the sweat. Even closer to target, its body heat.
The CO2 itself doesn't need to be warm or sweaty. Just when the mosquito is close to a target, it switches from the general vicinity (CO2) approach to one that will give it a better lock on.
About 10:35 into it it's about the mosquitos that feed on humans... but its zefrank, you're going to watch it all and chuckle at the humor.
Also there are some comments on that the poison they use is really harmful for marine life, so you shouldn't use it near water. Also personally not sure I like to have poison diffuser next me all time.
The point about harmful poison is very valid though. Definitely good to know and to avoid extended use. I'm less keen on buying it now, even though the protection from bites sounds promising.
Do you just open it and leave it there?
Anyone tried using those for mosquitoes?
Thinking about it:
If I leave the window open with the light on in summer there will be hundreds of mosquitoes in the room (together with ~50% other critters). Even if no one was inside.
Window open without light: a dozen mosquitoes at max (as counted by suddenly switching the light on).
Whatever is known about other species is not correct about our breed.
Some mayflies may look like mosquitoes, but they don't bite and are mostly harmless. It doesn't mean they are not annoying, especially when there are lots of them, and if that's a problem, UV light traps work great.
Or fish food.
I continue this direction but I do it very slowly. But at the same time, I received very important comments from you.
This is a small (5mm) black beetle that comes into beehives, usually around dusk, and causes massive havoc, can easily wipe out colonies quite quickly.
It arrived in Australia about 15 years ago, but is common almost everywhere else in the world now. There's lots of control mechanisms, but they're all incomplete (traps, nematodes in soil around the hive, mesh layers they can be pushed / fall through but bees can't fit through, etc).
A laser unit sitting in front of a hive, perhaps with an extended landing pad, seems like an excellent use case for an approach like yours.
So, if you're bored, and want to save the (beekpeeing) world ... ? : )
You would have no shortage of beta testers, and in the hobby / home space I would expect the market to be significant. Commercial hive operators, I'm less sure about how the economics would play out there.
There's at least one other pest that's large enough to be a good candidate for this approach - the wax moth.
There's plenty of other pests, but they're typically small and hitch a ride on bees, (eg varroa mite) so terminator gene really is our most hopeful solution for many of those.
I discovered a product called the guardian https://guardianbhe.com/ which is mounted by the entrance to a hive and uses red light to obscure that entrance. Wouldn't a similar configuration work, except instead of red light it would incinerate any intruders?
I guess it mainly just comes down to rapid recognition of the beetle. With that kind of info one could hook up any number of deterrents.
Alternatively, if not rapid recognition of the beetle, rapid recognition of bees and just zap anything else.
With a doorway-guard system it could maybe even be done with a tesla-coil-esque thing
A good candidate for an active defence system as the bees usually take at least a second from landing to getting inside, and a camera / laser could be mounted immediately above and restricted to a straight-down view (so quite safe for humans).
The guardian tool looks similar to something I recently bought, but have not attached to my hive yet[1]. It relies more on the physical mesh (being small enough beetles fall or can be pushed through) than the red colour, I think. The floor inside of my hives are also mesh, similarly sized, but made of metal -- beneath that is a shallow tray of cooking oil.
Personally I don't yet have a baseline for how much of this pest I'm going to have to deal with, but am adopting a 'whatever I can do' approach from the beginning, as their numbers, once inside the hive, can grow very rapidly.
Within my hives I have also have small oil-based traps sitting up higher in the boxes, again that bees can't fit through, but beetles can. Because bees will typically chase the beetles - they can't remove or sting them - and the beetles will try to find safety in crevices, which is the basis of most of these trap types.
[1] https://hornsby-beekeeping.com/beetle-off-entrance-hive-beet...
I always wondered if you can’t use several low power lasers and then cross the beams on the target?
As gene drive modifications become more accessible, preventing this becomes impossible.
The ones that carry malaria will almost certainly be wiped out.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/07/28/1020932...
I honestly don't know: will this affect the ecosystems? I think (at least) dragonflies eat mosquitoes. No idea how much the depend on them for food.
One mention of "gene" and you attract all the conspiracy theory evolution deniers that suspect the upcoming zombie apocalypse behind the most mundane technology, all the while combusted dinosaurs takes them to their job.
Don't worry, "the ecosystems" are perfectly fine with things appearing and disappearing constantly for the most random reasons.
What happened to "the ecosystems" when we went from millions of humans to billions is the extinction of many species, and disappearance of biodiversity in general :
> In absolute terms, the planet has lost 58% of its biodiversity since 1970 according to a 2016 study by the World Wildlife Fund. [0]
The ecosystems are definitely not 'perfectly fine' if we keep messing with them [1]
If you want something less dry than pure numbers, you can check the docuserie "Our Planet" on Netflix
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity#Threats [1]https://www.science.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.345.6195....
Well, its called "the sixth mass extinction", so I'd guess it isn't good.
"genetically altered mosquitoes to block the activity of a specific olfactory receptor called Ir8a. The result was that female mosquitoes — which are the ones that suck blood — were no longer attracted to lactic acid, an important component of human sweat."
So if we could refine this just a little bit more, we could engineer mosquitos which don't bite humans. And put that into a gene drive.
Still scary as fuck to mess this deeply with nature (note: post-doc work on viral evolution), but this is a less severe change than sterility.
This is always discussed in terms of the mosquitos and the population(s) of mosquitos.
Should we think, at all, of the population of malaria, globally ?
Is it possible that we could exert this tremendous pressure - an evolutionary chokepoint - on malaria and it escapes in some unexpected manner ?
This is not an area I have any background in so I hope someone can comment on this idea:
If we back an organism like malaria in a corner might heretofore out-competed mutations ascend and suddenly malaria comes at us from a new direction ?
The vast majority of non-bacterial species that are subjected to severe evolutionary pressure go extinct. The main reason this happens is they cannot adapt rapidly enough to respond to evolutionary pressure.
Malaria is a very complex parasitic disease which depends on a whole series of things going right across multiple hosts. If it's disrupted in either the mammal host or the insect host it's unable to reproduce. There's a number of disruptive events that can happen (such as blood cells being the wrong shape, preventing infection from the parasite). There's no variants of malaria that can infect sickle-shaped blood cells even though sickle-cell anemia is very common in malaria regions.
Unlike viruses and bacteria, there's no easy mechanism for a new variant of a parasite to spread its mutation laterally. The replication mechanism for parasites occurs much less frequently and produces much fewer copies than bacteria or viruses do. RNA-based viruses have very high mutation rates in general, due to the defects in RNA replication. The viral life cycle happens anew with every cell infection. Bacteria are even more adaptive - they can actually exchange genetic material even between replications, and of course replicate exponentially without depending on host cells. This is why viruses and especially bacteria can rapidly respond to evolutionary pressure. Other species are not so lucky. For a malaria parasite to respond to evolutionary pressure, it would have to go through its entire multi-host song and dance on every replication cycle. This already massively slows down mutations, as the number of mutations depends on the number of replications and the probability of mistranscription in each replication. But the important thing is that we are already using heavy interventions to prevent the spread of malaria - if we can drop the base rate of spread by some tens of percent and keep those measures, malaria will go extinct. If we remove the index host species (the particular susceptible mosquitoes) it's going to take a very long time for the parasite to successfully infect another species, as the number of replications drops massively and there's no replication reservoir where a new variant can develop. As the individual parasite's lifecycle is short, extinction is much more likely than adaptation.
I was not aware until just now that malaria is neither virus nor bacterium.
Thanks - appreciate your response.
https://www.mic.com/articles/180851/the-world-needs-this-sma...
How many times have you gone to swat a fly only to have it go out of view?
I thought about the laser approach so many times already, incredible that some people actually implemented it.
How does it do against other 'annoying elements in your surroundings'? ;-)
“ Carrying an Ultra Laser Umbrella, he walked out of the garage the car humming as it polished, into the dark rain outside in the alley. A cloud of mist covered the man, as his umbrella tracked every raindrop that would make contact with the man and instantly evaporated them before they could get the man wet.”
Published 14 years ago
I think one of the biggest advantages of moving to the moon or mars is never having to deal with mosquitos or rodents or cockroaches again.
Edit: I recently had a small corneal erosion from my eye drying out over night (eyelid was pulled open by sleeping in a weird posture) and I had 30% vision for 2 days on that eye. The cornea contributes about 40% (iirc could be more) to the total refractive power in the eye. If you have a UV-spot that melts moskitos dancing around on that for half a second...
I have to believe there is a threshold value of safety, particularly with IR. You can tell me I’m wrong, but please provide a bit of physics to justify it.
* you'd need to have very good optics and optomechanics on each laser to make the spot small enough - the smaller optics on each smaller laser would make the spot worse than one created with a single large lens, unless the single lasers are actually from a single coherent source
Shawn Woods on YouTube has a passion for mouse traps. The most effective one is a bucket with a plank, he can catch about 20 mice a night with just one bucket.
Real. Soon. Now.
For a thermal kill you have to deliver some number of Joules of energy into the target. You can use a lower powered laser over a longer period of time, up to a point. You have roughly 25 milliseconds of thermal confinement time before the mosquito starts to cool off. Longer exposures can work, but the total energy dose needed goes up. Longer exposures also require keeping the laser aimed at the target for a longer time.
Power needed also depends on how closely you can track the target. If you make the spot small enough that the target catches all of it then you minimize power requirements, but that increases the complexity of the optics. If you use a spot size larger than the target then the optical and tracking complexity go down, but you're no longer sending all of your Joules into the target.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/laser-shooting-mosqu...
What do you mean by this? In what jurisdictions is it a crime to “interfere” with someone that pulls a gun?
That something is considered somewhat safe under very specific usage restrictions doesn't mean that's how it will be used. Rubber bullets are rated only for indirect fire by bouncing off the ground from a safe distance, yet no law enforcement officer faced any consequence over almost exclusively firing them directly at protestors, often at too short a range even for indirect use.
The damage in lasers is not caused by brightness but by literally heating up and burning parts of the eye because you're shooting an already dense beam at a lens. A flashlight is much safer and doesn't require fancy AI to aim.
That said, I hope you're not seriously proposing putting literal sentry guns in public places to deal with shootings. I thought I wouldn't have to explain why you can't fix the result of socioeconomic problems with technology.